MONDAY NIGHT LECTURE SERIES | PERSONHOOD | FALL 2023

Transgenic: Re/Making The American Chestnut Tree

Elaine Gan • Wesleyan University

November 13th @ 6pm • Daniel Family Commons   

This presentation engages questions of personhood by investigating a past and future crop: Castanea dentata or the American chestnut tree. Once known as the “Queen of Forests” from Maine down to Georgia, billions of these trees succumbed to disease caused by a fungus (Cryphonectria parasitica) that had entered through plant nurseries in the nineteenth century. Only a few hundred stand today, vestiges of one of the worst ecological and economic shifts in the nation’s history. But things are set to change again. Scientists at the American Chestnut Research & Restoration Project at SUNY ESF in Syracuse, NY have developed a transgenic fungus-resistant version, nicknamed Darling 58, and await government approvals for deregulation which will permit widespread planting and open pollination within the next five years. Multiple groups—including settler farmer communities, members of indigenous nations, agricultural experiment stations, park managers, arboreal-fungal lovers, citizen scientists, artists, researchers, and of course more-than-human assemblages—make and are made by these various transformations. Such changing modes of being—or trans-ness—require experimental, creative modes of articulation and analysis.

Personhood
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